Satellite Notes

The satellite name, Norad id and international launch designation are supplied by the program from your 2 line element file, you fill out the rest.

The "Notes" section of this window is stored in a separate file with the file name created using the norad number and an extension of rtf (rich text file). For above this would be "25544.rtf". It is stored in the same folder where you indicated (on the setup screen) that you stored your sat notes file. If you create lots of notes files, you might consider placing them in their own Folder.

I separated the notes out into a separate file so you could have a note file of essentially unlimited size, with some rudimentary formatting. The original design of this form stored the notes as a field in the satnotes file. But that limited it to 255 characters long and any carriage returns had to be discarded.

You can fill out the Notes part of the screen by cutting and pasting text from most any source. Some formatting elements will be preserved in pasted text. However, not all elements of the Rich Text File format are used in VB's RTF routines. Most are there so, your imported text should look OK.

If you wish to create fancy formatted files for display here, use a text editor that can read/write rich text files (MS Word for example). If you just want to jot down a few lines about a satellite, you can type directly into this screen. But, no formatting controls are provided. So, you can't select fonts, highlighting etc. Do that in Word.

In the example above, you'll notice that "Expedition One" is underlined. It looks like a link. Well, I just copied the Ariss web page into notes and that highlighting came along. Be aware that this is NOT an active link.

As you can see, there is some screen real estate available at the top of the window so, I'll accept suggestions for data fields but no guarantees they will be implemented. 

The source file/folder for these notes can be specified on the Setup Screen.